Comments on: Bill Easterly’s new book: brilliant on technocrats, flawed on rights, wrong on aid and hopeless on Chinahttp://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/bill-easterlys-new-book-brilliant-on-technocrats-flawed-on-rights-wrong-on-aid-and-hopeless-on-china/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bill-easterlys-new-book-brilliant-on-technocrats-flawed-on-rights-wrong-on-aid-and-hopeless-on-china
How active citizens and effective states can change the worldTue, 03 Mar 2015 13:00:54 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1By: Allisonhttp://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/bill-easterlys-new-book-brilliant-on-technocrats-flawed-on-rights-wrong-on-aid-and-hopeless-on-china/#comment-20505
AllisonWed, 04 Jun 2014 17:29:14 +0000http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=18080#comment-20505I was also struck by the book’s problematic approach to rights. Its claim that the debate about the role of rights in development has been missing ignores a rich array of literature on the topic. Disappointingly, this precludes the more interesting discussion about whether rights programming itself has become too technocratic, as you highlight. Perhaps that will be the topic of the sequel!
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TessaTue, 03 Jun 2014 15:05:37 +0000http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=18080#comment-20497I completely agree with this review, especially the critique of Easterly’s understanding of rights. Inexplicably, he names political and economic rights as ‘fundamental human rights’ (and therefore addresses his analysis to those rights), but excludes social and cultural rights, which clearly have the same status in international law as economic rights. I wonder if it’s because accepting the equal footing of all of those rights demands a recognition of the central role of governments (and therefore, the need for external assistance in the way of aid) to support the realisation of the right to health, education, housing, etc.

I’m surprised that there was no one in Easterly’s team of collaborators/editors with a sufficient understanding of the legal and normative human rights framework to point this out, especially given the centrality of human rights to the premise of the book. An example of the tyranny of economists?